annual report 2011 - Office for Research - Northwestern University

Loran Nordgren
Kellogg School of Management
The Empathy Gap between Perception
and Pain
Torture is prohibited by statutes worldwide, yet the legal
definition of torture is almost invariably based on an
inherently subjective judgment involving pain severity.
Because most policy makers have never experienced
waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation tactics
for themselves (Senator McCain aside), they must rely on
their inexperienced intuitions about how painful these
practices seem. Yet work being done by Loran Nordgren,
management and organizations, has shown that people
who aren’t enduring a painful experience have a hard
time estimating just how painful it is. This finding is
known as an empathy gap, and it helps to explain why
doctors underestimate their patients’ pain and why
patients themselves underestimate how painful upcoming
procedures will be.
To test the idea that empathy gaps might distort the
evaluation of torture policy, Nordgren and members
of his lab asked people to evaluate common enhanced
interrogation tactics such as sleep deprivation, solitary
confinement, and exposure to cold temperatures. Some
participants (the control group) evaluated these practices
under normal conditions, while others (the experimental
group) made their judgments while experiencing a mild
version of the pain associated with those techniques. These
participants submerged their hand in ice water (exposure to
cold temperatures), felt social exclusion by being rejected
by a group (solitary confinement), and were tested at the
end of a three-hour night class (sleep deprivation).
In each case the experimental group estimated the
interrogation tactics to be significantly more painful, less
ethical, and less acceptable as a practice than participants
who made their judgments free of pain, as policy makers
normally would. These findings suggest that policy makers
(and the concerned public) suffer from a fundamental bias
when evaluating waterboarding and other interrogation
tactics. It appears that the legal standard for evaluating
torture is psychologically untenable. According to
Nordgren, policy makers simply cannot appreciate the
severity of interrogation practices they themselves have
not experienced, a psychological constraint that in effect
encourages torture.
Andrew Campbell
Excellence in Research | Annual Report 2011 47